OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-hop Multi-RIS Wireless Communication Systems: Multi-reflection Path Scheduling and Beamforming
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) provides a promising way to proactively augment propagation environments for better transmission performance in wireless communications. Existing multi-RIS works mainly focus on link-level optimization with predetermined transmission paths, which cannot be directly extended to system-level management, since they neither consider the interference caused by undesired scattering of RISs, nor the performance balancing between different transmission paths. To address this, we study an innovative multi-hop multi-RIS communication system, where a base station (BS) transmits information to a set of distributed users over multi-RIS configuration space in a multi-hop manner. The signals for each user are subsequently reflected by the selected RISs via multi-reflection line-of-sight (LoS) links. To ensure that all users have fair access to the system to avoid excessive number of RISs serving one user, we aim to find the optimal beam reflecting path for each user, while judiciously determining the path scheduling strategies with the corresponding beamforming design to ensure the fairness. Due to the presence of interference caused by undesired scattering of RISs, it is highly challenging to solve the formulated multi-RIS multi-path beamforming optimization problem. To solve it, we first derive the optimal RISs' phase shifts and the corresponding reflecting path selection for each user based on its practical deployment location. With the optimized multi-reflection paths, we obtain a feasible user grouping pattern for effective interference mitigation by constructing the maximum independent sets (MISs). Finally, we propose a joint heuristic algorithm to iteratively update the beamforming vectors and the group scheduling policies to maximize the minimum equivalent data rate of all users.
Orthogonally Initiated Particle Swarm Optimization with Advanced Mutation for Real-Parameter Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

This article introduces an enhanced particle swarm optimizer (PSO), termed Orthogonal PSO with Mutation (OPSO-m). Initially, it proposes an orthogonal array-based learning approach to cultivate an improved initial swarm for PSO, significantly boosting the adaptability of swarm-based optimization algorithms. The article further presents archive-based self-adaptive learning strategies, dividing the population into regular and elite subgroups. Each subgroup employs distinct learning mechanisms. The regular group utilizes efficient learning schemes derived from three unique archives, which categorize individuals based on their quality levels. Additionally, a mutation strategy is implemented to update the positions of elite individuals. Comparative studies are conducted to assess the effectiveness of these learning strategies in OPSO-m, evaluating its optimization capacity through exploration-exploitation dynamics and population diversity analysis. The proposed OPSO-m model is tested on real-parameter challenges from the CEC 2017 suite in 10, 30, 50, and 100-dimensional search spaces, with its results compared to contemporary state-of-the-art algorithms using a sensitivity metric. OPSO-m exhibits distinguished performance in the precision of solutions, rapidity of convergence, efficiency in search, and robust stability, thus highlighting its superior aptitude for resolving intricate optimization issues.
Like Humans to Few-Shot Learning through Knowledge Permeation of Vision and Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Few-shot learning aims to generalize the recognizer from seen categories to an entirely novel scenario. With only a few support samples, several advanced methods initially introduce class names as prior knowledge for identifying novel classes. However, obstacles still impede achieving a comprehensive understanding of how to harness the mutual advantages of visual and textual knowledge. In this paper, we propose a coherent Bidirectional Knowledge Permeation strategy called BiKop, which is grounded in a human intuition: A class name description offers a general representation, whereas an image captures the specificity of individuals. BiKop primarily establishes a hierarchical joint general-specific representation through bidirectional knowledge permeation. On the other hand, considering the bias of joint representation towards the base set, we disentangle base-class-relevant semantics during training, thereby alleviating the suppression of potential novel-class-relevant information. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks demonstrate the remarkable superiority of BiKop. Our code will be publicly available.
RA: A machine based rational agent, Part 1
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

RA is a software package that couples machine learning with formal reasoning in an attempt to find the laws that generate the empirical data that it has been given access to. A brief outline of RA in its initial stage of development is presented. Particular emphasis is given to current design strategies that aim to endow RA with the ability to construct its own conjectures of which it constructs proofs.
Online Signature Recognition: A Biologically Inspired Feature Vector Splitting Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This research introduces an innovative approach to explore the cognitive and biologically inspired underpinnings of feature vector splitting for analyzing the significance of different attributes in e-security biometric signature recognition applications. Departing from traditional methods of concatenating features into an extended set, we employ multiple splitting strategies, aligning with cognitive principles, to preserve control over the relative importance of each feature subset. Our methodology is applied to three diverse databases (MCYT100, MCYT300,and SVC) using two classifiers (vector quantization and dynamic time warping with one and five training samples). Experimentation demonstrates that the fusion of pressure data with spatial coordinates (x and y) consistently enhances performance. However, the inclusion of pen-tip angles in the same feature set yields mixed results, with performance improvements observed in select cases. This work delves into the cognitive aspects of feature fusion,shedding light on the cognitive relevance of feature vector splitting in e-security biometric applications.
Gamification of IT for training in information systems management
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This article examines the integration of IT competitions, in particular Capture The Flag, into an information systems management course to fill skills gaps, particularly in the field of cybersecurity. An educational CTF team has been set up at IAE Paris-Est with the aim of developing students' skills. Workshops, challenges, and events have been organised to familiarise them with the CTFs and offer them support adapted to their level. Preliminary results show the importance of soft skills in improving cybersecurity skills. The CTF pedagogical team is continuing to experiment with and evaluate these methods to improve the accessibility and effectiveness of cybersecurity training.
Quantifying Semantic Emergence in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are widely recognized for their exceptional capacity to capture semantics meaning. Yet, there remains no established metric to quantify this capability. In this work, we introduce a quantitative metric, Information Emergence (IE), designed to measure LLMs' ability to extract semantics from input tokens. We formalize ``semantics'' as the meaningful information abstracted from a sequence of tokens and quantify this by comparing the entropy reduction observed for a sequence of tokens (macro-level) and individual tokens (micro-level). To achieve this, we design a lightweight estimator to compute the mutual information at each transformer layer, which is agnostic to different tasks and language model architectures. We apply IE in both synthetic in-context learning (ICL) scenarios and natural sentence contexts. Experiments demonstrate informativeness and patterns about semantics. While some of these patterns confirm the conventional prior linguistic knowledge, the rest are relatively unexpected, which may provide new insights.
MentalQA: An Annotated Arabic Corpus for Questions and Answers of Mental Healthcare
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Mental health disorders significantly impact people globally, regardless of background, education, or socioeconomic status. However, access to adequate care remains a challenge, particularly for underserved communities with limited resources. Text mining tools offer immense potential to support mental healthcare by assisting professionals in diagnosing and treating patients. This study addresses the scarcity of Arabic mental health resources for developing such tools. We introduce MentalQA, a novel Arabic dataset featuring conversational-style question-and-answer (QA) interactions. To ensure data quality, we conducted a rigorous annotation process using a well-defined schema with quality control measures. Data was collected from a question-answering medical platform. The annotation schema for mental health questions and corresponding answers draws upon existing classification schemes with some modifications. Question types encompass six distinct categories: diagnosis, treatment, anatomy \& physiology, epidemiology, healthy lifestyle, and provider choice. Answer strategies include information provision, direct guidance, and emotional support. Three experienced annotators collaboratively annotated the data to ensure consistency. Our findings demonstrate high inter-annotator agreement, with Fleiss' Kappa of $0.61$ for question types and $0.98$ for answer strategies. In-depth analysis revealed insightful patterns, including variations in question preferences across age groups and a strong correlation between question types and answer strategies. MentalQA offers a valuable foundation for developing Arabic text mining tools capable of supporting mental health professionals and individuals seeking information.
Play Everywhere: A Temporal Logic based Game Environment Independent Approach for Playing Soccer with Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Robots playing soccer often rely on hard-coded behaviors that struggle to generalize when the game environment change. In this paper, we propose a temporal logic based approach that allows robots' behaviors and goals to adapt to the semantics of the environment. In particular, we present a hierarchical representation of soccer in which the robot selects the level of operation based on the perceived semantic characteristics of the environment, thus modifying dynamically the set of rules and goals to apply. The proposed approach enables the robot to operate in unstructured environments, just as it happens when humans go from soccer played on an official field to soccer played on a street. Three different use cases set in different scenarios are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Towards an AI/ML-defined Radio for Wi-Fi: Overview, Challenges, and Roadmap
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Will AI/ML-defined radios become a reality in the near future? In this paper, we introduce the concept of an AI/ML-defined radio - a radio architecture specifically designed to support AI/ML-based optimization and decision-making in communication functions - and depict its promised benefits and potential challenges. Additionally, we discuss a potential roadmap for the development and adoption of AI/ML-defined radios, and highlight the enablers for addressing their associated challenges. While we offer a general overview of the AI/ML-defined radio concept, our focus throughout the paper remains on Wi-Fi, a wireless technology that may significantly benefit from the integration of AI/ML-defined radios, owing to its inherent decentralized management and operation within unlicensed frequency bands.
Sorting in One and Two Rounds using $t$-Comparators
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We examine sorting algorithms for $n$ elements whose basic operation is comparing $t$ elements simultaneously (a $t$-comparator). We focus on algorithms that use only a single round or two rounds -- comparisons performed in the second round depend on the outcomes of the first round comparators. We design deterministic and randomized algorithms. In the deterministic case, we show an interesting relation to design theory (namely, to 2-Steiner systems), which yields a single-round optimal algorithm for $n=t^{2^k}$ with any $k\ge 1$ and a variety of possible values of $t$. For some values of $t$, however, no algorithm can reach the optimal (information-theoretic) bound on the number of comparators. For this case (and any other $n$ and $t$), we show an algorithm that uses at most three times as many comparators as the theoretical bound. We also design a randomized Las-Vegas two-rounds sorting algorithm for any $n$ and $t$. Our algorithm uses an asymptotically optimal number of $O(\max(\frac{n^{3/2}}{t^2},\frac{n}{t}))$ comparators, with high probability, i.e., with probability at least $1-1/n$. The analysis of this algorithm involves the gradual unveiling of randomness, using a novel technique which we coin the binary tree of deferred randomness.
A Masked Semi-Supervised Learning Approach for Otago Micro Labels Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The Otago Exercise Program (OEP) serves as a vital rehabilitation initiative for older adults, aiming to enhance their strength and balance, and consequently prevent falls. While Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems have been widely employed in recognizing the activities of individuals, existing systems focus on the duration of macro activities (i.e. a sequence of repetitions of the same exercise), neglecting the ability to discern micro activities (i.e. the individual repetitions of the exercises), in the case of OEP. This study presents a novel semi-supervised machine learning approach aimed at bridging this gap in recognizing the micro activities of OEP. To manage the limited dataset size, our model utilizes a Transformer encoder for feature extraction, subsequently classified by a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Simultaneously, the Transformer encoder is employed for masked unsupervised learning to reconstruct input signals. Results indicate that the masked unsupervised learning task enhances the performance of the supervised learning (classification task), as evidenced by f1-scores surpassing the clinically applicable threshold of 0.8. From the micro activities, two clinically relevant outcomes emerge: counting the number of repetitions of each exercise and calculating the velocity during chair rising. These outcomes enable the automatic monitoring of exercise intensity and difficulty in the daily lives of older adults.
RemoCap: Disentangled Representation Learning for Motion Capture
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Reconstructing 3D human bodies from realistic motion sequences remains a challenge due to pervasive and complex occlusions. Current methods struggle to capture the dynamics of occluded body parts, leading to model penetration and distorted motion. RemoCap leverages Spatial Disentanglement (SD) and Motion Disentanglement (MD) to overcome these limitations. SD addresses occlusion interference between the target human body and surrounding objects. It achieves this by disentangling target features along the dimension axis. By aligning features based on their spatial positions in each dimension, SD isolates the target object's response within a global window, enabling accurate capture despite occlusions. The MD module employs a channel-wise temporal shuffling strategy to simulate diverse scene dynamics. This process effectively disentangles motion features, allowing RemoCap to reconstruct occluded parts with greater fidelity. Furthermore, this paper introduces a sequence velocity loss that promotes temporal coherence. This loss constrains inter-frame velocity errors, ensuring the predicted motion exhibits realistic consistency. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on benchmark datasets demonstrate RemoCap's superior performance in 3D human body reconstruction. On the 3DPW dataset, RemoCap surpasses all competitors, achieving the best results in MPVPE (81.9), MPJPE (72.7), and PA-MPJPE (44.1) metrics. Codes are available at https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/RemoCap/.
Dullahan: Stealthy Backdoor Attack against Without-Label-Sharing Split Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

As a novel privacy-preserving paradigm aimed at reducing client computational costs and achieving data utility, split learning has garnered extensive attention and proliferated widespread applications across various fields, including smart health and smart transportation, among others. While recent studies have primarily concentrated on addressing privacy leakage concerns in split learning, such as inference attacks and data reconstruction, the exploration of security issues (e.g., backdoor attacks) within the framework of split learning has been comparatively limited. Nonetheless, the security vulnerability within the context of split learning is highly posing a threat and can give rise to grave security implications, such as the illegal impersonation in the face recognition model. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a stealthy backdoor attack strategy (namely SBAT) tailored to the without-label-sharing split learning architecture, which unveils the inherent security vulnerability of split learning. We posit the existence of a potential attacker on the server side aiming to introduce a backdoor into the training model, while exploring two scenarios: one with known client network architecture and the other with unknown architecture. Diverging from traditional backdoor attack methods that manipulate the training data and labels, we constructively conduct the backdoor attack by injecting the trigger embedding into the server network. Specifically, our SBAT achieves a higher level of attack stealthiness by refraining from modifying any intermediate parameters (e.g., gradients) during training and instead executing all malicious operations post-training.
Parallel Algorithm for Optimal Threshold Labeling of Ordinal Regression Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Ordinal regression (OR) is classification of ordinal data in which the underlying categorical target variable has a natural ordinal relation for the underlying explanatory variable. For $K$-class OR tasks, threshold methods learn a one-dimensional transformation (1DT) of the explanatory variable so that 1DT values for observations of the explanatory variable preserve the order of label values $1,\ldots,K$ for corresponding observations of the target variable well, and then assign a label prediction to the learned 1DT through threshold labeling, namely, according to the rank of an interval to which the 1DT belongs among intervals on the real line separated by $(K-1)$ threshold parameters. In this study, we propose a parallelizable algorithm to find the optimal threshold labeling, which was developed in previous research, and derive sufficient conditions for that algorithm to successfully output the optimal threshold labeling. In a numerical experiment we performed, the computation time taken for the whole learning process of a threshold method with the optimal threshold labeling could be reduced to approximately 60\,\% by using the proposed algorithm with parallel processing compared to using an existing algorithm based on dynamic programming.
Faster Linear-Size And-Or Path and Adder Circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We consider the fundamental problem of constructing fast and small circuits for binary addition. We propose a new algorithm with running time $\mathcal O(n \log_2 n)$ for constructing linear-size $n$-bit adder circuits with a significantly better depth guarantee compared to previous approaches: Our circuits have a depth of at most $\log_2 n + \log_2 \log_2 n + \log_2 \log_2 \log_2 n + \text{const}$, improving upon the previously best circuits by [12] with a depth of at most $\log_2 n + 8 \sqrt{\log_2 n} + 6 \log_2 \log_2 n + \text{const}$. Hence, we decrease the gap to the lower bound of $\log_2 n + \log_2 \log_2 n + \text{const}$ by [5] significantly from $\mathcal O (\sqrt{\log_2 n})$ to $\mathcal O(\log_2 \log_2 \log_2 n)$. Our core routine is a new algorithm for the construction of a circuit for a single carry bit, or, more generally, for an And-Or path, i.e., a Boolean function of type $t_0 \lor ( t_1 \land (t_2 \lor ( \dots t_{m-1}) \dots ))$. We compute linear-size And-Or path circuits with a depth of at most $\log_2 m + \log_2 \log_2 m + 0.65$ in time $\mathcal O(m \log_2 m)$. These are the first And-Or path circuits known that, up to an additive constant, match the lower bound by [5] and at the same time have a linear size. The previously fastest And-Or path circuits are only by an additive constant worse in depth, but have a much higher size in the order of $\mathcal O (m \log_2 m)$.
Blind Separation of Vibration Sources using Deep Learning and Deconvolution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Vibrations of rotating machinery primarily originate from two sources, both of which are distorted by the machine's transfer function on their way to the sensor: the dominant gear-related vibrations and a low-energy signal linked to bearing faults. The proposed method facilitates the blind separation of vibration sources, eliminating the need for any information about the monitored equipment or external measurements. This method estimates both sources in two stages: initially, the gear signal is isolated using a dilated CNN, followed by the estimation of the bearing fault signal using the squared log envelope of the residual. The effect of the transfer function is removed from both sources using a novel whitening-based deconvolution method (WBD). Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate the method's ability to detect bearing failures early when no additional information is available. This study considers both local and distributed bearing faults, assuming that the vibrations are recorded under stable operating conditions.
A Novel Methodology for Autonomous Planetary Exploration Using Multi-Robot Teams
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

One of the fundamental limiting factors in planetary exploration is the autonomous capabilities of planetary exploration rovers. This study proposes a novel methodology for trustworthy autonomous multi-robot teams which incorporates data from multiple sources (HiRISE orbiter imaging, probability distribution maps, and on-board rover sensors) to find efficient exploration routes in Jezero crater. A map is generated, consisting of a 3D terrain model, traversability analysis, and probability distribution map of points of scientific interest. A three-stage mission planner generates an efficient route, which maximises the accumulated probability of identifying points of interest. A 4D RRT* algorithm is used to determine smooth, flat paths, and prioritised planning is used to coordinate a safe set of paths. The above methodology is shown to coordinate safe and efficient rover paths, which ensure the rovers remain within their nominal pitch and roll limits throughout operation.